Laurelines

Riding the chi: my artist's statement, illustrated

I'd dreaded coming up with the artist's statement I needed to have to apply for a solo show in 2013. Not to disparage artists (one of whom I am, you'll have noticed) but their/our "statements" are often, well, boring and pretentious. Lots of words are used, though!

Don't ask me why this is. I'm already in hot water enough by revealing my feelings about these darned things. Besides, I don't know why. So that's reason number two not to ask.

(By the way, most of my artist friends dislike writing these statements... it's never really OUR idea in the first place.)

My particular main task, it seemed to me, was to figure out and explain what unifies the various, seemingly loosely related, paintings and drawings I produce. 

Here are two recent ones, as cases in point. Keep in mind, too, my volcano pieces, though I may be at the end of this series for the moment.

This is a study for what I think might be a return to a theme I've dealt with a lot in the past: rocks and water. I'll do lots of these studies and then see how they might translate into larger paintings.

And here's a drawing I made yesterday with a garden subject:

And here is my artist's statement. It incorporates what I've done in the volcano series, as well as some of my other past work, and tries to anticipate how I might be doing over the next months. Pretentious it probably is, but it feels true.

I’m a restless artist, a shape shifter, a seeker, never able to stay in one place, keep to one mode of making art, for long. Painting hasn’t come easily for me. Drawing is my native language. Not long ago, on reading Michael Pollan’s wonderful book A Place of My Own , I was reminded of the concept of ‘chi:’

' "Chi" is the Chinese word for the earth spirit, or cosmic breath, which flows in invisible currents over the face of the earth... . This earth spirit animates all living things.'

It’s when I address in paint this chi, this force that thrills me, that animates the world as I experience it, that I begin to be a painter in a way that matters to me.

In these pieces, I'm leaping back and forth between the particular and the abstract, all the while reveling in texture and color, in energy.

I feel like I’m reinventing myself as a painter... or I’m being reinvented. When you’re a shape shifter as I am, and you’re riding the chi, it’s hard to tell.

Painting and drawing, a balance

It interests me to see how apparently different the current products of these two pursuits of mine are.

My friend Concetta Flore asked what size the volcano paintings are. They are 11" x 14"... a good, manageable size to begin to explore a new subject. I see them hanging as a group. I'm applying for a solo show for 2013. These volcano pieces are my first foray in creating a body of work for that show. 

Here are the finished paintings in my studio:

And here are a couple of quick sketches made in my garden this morning.

I'll be writing my artist's statement in the next few days, the first I've had to write in years. I'll have to figure out why I do what I do and why I am who I am. I won't know the answers until I start to write!

Painting paroxysms, round two

Four more finished to add to the three already done. Three in the wings. After  I finish 8 to 10 of these volcano paintings, I'll move to the next series. Which is still a little glimmer in my mind and heart. We shall see what emerges!

Sketching at the North Carolina Museum of Art

I'm still madly and happily painting volcanoes, but I miss frequent sketching. My husband and I went to the North Carolina Museum of Art this past weekend to remedy the situation. Here is what resulted: 

This polychrome 18th century German, 'Adoring Angel,' calls to me. I've sketched this before,

but wanted to connect to the angel again.

Another view:

On a (very) different plane, here is a self-portrait:

and a vignette from the African Gallery:

The second batch of volcanoes should be ready to share soon. I can't rush the process, much as I wish I could.

Marly Youmans and her pip of a new novel

Is there anyone out there, still living (besides me), who knows the term " a pip of a... ?" It's the second part of the THIRD definition on Dictionary. com: 

pip

   /pɪp/  

noun

Also called pipperoo. Informal . Someone or something wonderful: Last night's party was a pip.

And this new Marly book, to appear on bookstore shelves and e-shelves everywhere today,  is *apparently a pip, too---the winner, for example, of the 2012 Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction.

 

 

Noted writer Raymond L. Atkins  puts Marly's book in the high pip category, too. Here's something of what HE had to say of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage:

 In A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans gives us a beautifully written and exceptionally satisfying novel.  The book reads as if Youmans took the best parts of The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road, The Reivers, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and crafted from them a tale both magical and fine... .

Several of Marly's friends, writers, painters, blogonauts, have interviewed her on the topic of her new book. I am one of these and so here we are: you, me, and Marly.

Laura:

Reading about your new book on your blog, I, of course, noticed that your orphan protagonist shares a name with that other famous orphan protagonist, Pip of Dickens's Great Expectations. That book and Bleak House are two of my lifelong favorites, by the way, so they figure hugely in my imagination and memory.

Names such as Pip or Ishmael or Scarlett, for example, naturally carry strong associations for readers. When a new character bears a name with heavy historical reference, we (the reader) think, "Aha! So how does THIS Pip relate to the Dickens Pip? What is the author telling us about this new Pip, even before his story starts? Is this an ironic use of the name or is it some kind of homage to the Dickens one? What does this MEAN, because in the whole unlimited universe of names from which to choose, the new author has chosen this one and there has to be a reason!

In this case, the fact that the two Pips are orphans seems a double underlining of the connection between them.

Therefore, although perhaps the Pip question has been asked a million times, I'm going to ask it again. Why the Dickens orphan reference, or ...What the Dickens?

Marly:

Laura, it is your luck to be number one! Nobody has yet asked me that question.

 

At one time there was a Dickens reference at the start of the A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, but I am afraid that I took a scalpel to it on the last pass through the manuscript. In an earlier version, I did make an offhand connection to Great Expectations in a line where the naming of Pip was referred back to the Dickens Pip as “a boy who turned out well enough.” Gone!

 

But I was very much a Dickens fan as a child and still am. His somewhat untidy books are overflowing life, and even his flat characters buzz and spin with vigor. Every now and then I feel a pressing need to reread Bleak House, and Great Expectations is among those I have read and reread. When I finally was allowed an adult library card in 6^th grade, I headed straight for whatever Dickens novels were not already shelved in the children’s section.

 

Pip’s family is composed of brothers and sisters with names that are palindromes or palindrome-like:  Otto, Chach, Lil, Mim, and so on, all named by the family patriarch.  Here’s what Pip has to say about those names: “All my brothers and sisters had names like mine—turn them around like in a mirror and they’re just the same, backwards, forwards, inside out. It was a mad freak of my daddy’s to name them that way.  Old Gilead Tattnal.  I guess he was a God-crazy man.  Thought the alpha and omega of a name had to be just the same.  But it makes no sense to me.  God’s not the same backwards and forwards.”

  

The protagonist struck me as a Pip from out of the possible palindromes right away, not so much because of Dickens (I didn’t even think of Great Expectations until later, although certainly the orphan idea is present, and an important relationship with a sibling—none of those uncommon in the world of books or in hard times, which both Pips endure) but because it felt right. Many a writer has not so much chosen a name as met a character with name already fastened, and that is how it seemed with Pip.

 

In some long-buried way, the naming may have something to do with my father having a 3-letter nickname beginning with “P” in childhood. Not a palindrome, but short. While Pip is not modeled after my father, I used the sharecropper’s house where he grew up as the model for the orphanage, and several times my father ran away and rode the rails when he was a teen. I don't doubt that it was a lot more fun than picking cotton or pulling tobacco--sixty years later, he could still doom any noun to perdition by putting “cotton-picking” in front of it.

 

Clearly the circularity of these names, particularly the name of Otto, plays some role in the story.  But I’ll leave that for somebody who wants to put on a critic’s hat, as the reasons for this choice felt obscure but important to me, and I had no wish to investigate them.

Laura:

So the Pip of your novel has no direct association to the earlier Dickens' one? 

Marly:

Not a deliberate one; I thought of the name, and then a moment later realized that it had been used by Dickens. Certainly there is a common thread joining one orphan to another--for each, a sister is quite important. The name came more from an awareness of "Pip" as suggesting the mostly-British usage of  "pipped" or wounded, "pip" as seed that may grow and flower and fruit, and "pip" as the first step of a bird toward hatching. All these things bear on the protagonist's situation and say something about it and him. Of course I remembered the Pip created by Dickens and "brought up by hand." But what did not occur to me until you asked this question was another literary reference--to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and "The Five Orange Pips." The surprising thought just came to me that "The Five Orange Pips" fetches up not only one of many writers (like Dickens) I loved in childhood, but also a direct link between "pip" and danger, death, Savannah, and the K. K. K.

Laura:

Thank you, Marly. Our discussion teaches me, once again, how the truths and power of a well-drawn character are bigger, deeper, and more various than the reader or the writer, ( if I may be so bold as to claim), can know or predict at the outset.

* I'll find out soon when I get my own copy of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage at our great local bookstore Flyleaf Books. It can be ordered online at amazon.com and other venues. Read it, won't you?

Two quick springtime sketches

Gosh, yes, I'm still here. I'm still painting volcanoes and having a wonderful time (well, some of the time it's wonderful. Other times, it's slow and frustrating.)  I'm doing less sketching than I used to, precisely because I'm painting more, but I WILL establish a balance between the two in due course. I need to do both, because both are integral parts of my life.

In the next day or so, I'm going to do a post about a new novel by my friend Marly Youmans, to be released this Friday. I'm so excited about her new work and I hope you will be, too. 

 

Anyway, here you go, some quick Laurelinear sketches. More, more, more stuff to come.

And may I thank all of you dear people who responded to my family's call to support the March for Babies on behalf of our stillborn baby Theodore. You have my most heartfelt gratitude---and that of my daughter Kate. And if you haven't yet, you still have time to click on the above link to help this very worthy cause.